| Anything like this needs a framework and a plan. And sometimes the rules get
in the way. Visiting the US for up to 90 days is fairly easy if you are a UK citizen.
To go for 3-6 months requires a visitor's visa and beyond that gets really
difficult. Beyond a year becomes really impossible for reasons I cover later. So
we decided to limit ourselves to one year for the travelling (but to go over
beforehand to deal with all the setting up tasks like actually buying an RV and
investigating communications options and providers). That gives one week per US State! Now
Rhode Island and Delaware may not need that long, and Hawaii is a bit difficult
with an RV, but New York and Texas (among others) take a good part of that just to drive
across! There are those that argue that Idaho and Wyoming could be omitted but
the folk that live there often disagree. Besides, when you come from an island
where it is impossible to drive for much more than a mile without a road to the right or left,
or to be more than a mile from habitation, then the concept of driving on an
almost uninhabited dead straight road all day through grain fields has a certain
appeal (at least once!)
Now we did this in Australia, although the fields were full of sugar cane
then, and covered 4000 miles in a month by driving
almost continuously. So we decided to limit ourselves to 25000 miles for the
year or about 2000 miles/month. That is enough to go coast to coast or north to
south a bit less than once a month. It implies driving for no more than a couple
of hours a day on average. There are no hard and fast rules
in this.
More difficult is deciding where you want to go. And at this stage (October
2004) we have no
definitive plans. |